The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has removed a headline from its website claiming that “vaccines do not cause autism” following a legal challenge questioning that assertion.

The change was quietly made last August, with no announcement, following a lengthy legal battle with the group Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) that began in 2017.

Here is the original:

And here is the edited version:

From ICAN’s website:

 Instead of walking away after the CDC effectively admitted it did not have the studies ICAN sought, ICAN sued the CDC in federal court. The suit focused on the CDC’s claim that “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism” on the basis that the CDC had not specifically listed the precise studies that it asserts support that claim. This lawsuit also quoted from the deposition of Dr. Stanley Plotkin, the godfather of vaccinology, who admitted under oath that he was “okay with telling the parent that DTaP/Tdap does not cause autism even though the science isn’t there yet to support that claim.”

This resulted in the CDC, under court order, presenting 20 studies supporting the claim that vaccines don’t cause autism, which the Institute of Medicine (IOM) found did not hold muster.

The IOM concluded that it could not identify a single study to support that DTaP does not cause autism. Instead, the only relevant study the IOM could identify found an association between DTaP and autism.

In other words, the only study the CDC listed that actually looked at any of the vaccines given to babies during the first six months of life concluded that there are no studies to support that DTaP does not cause autism. Yet, the CDC chose that study as one of the few that supports its claim that “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism”!

And so, to avoid more legal headwinds with ICAN, the CDC then finally removed the claim that vaccines don’t cause autism, a claim Infowars has been refuting for years.

According to CDC data, 1 in 36 children born this year will develop autism.